Pressure to pick cool names mounts
Some parents feel “unprecedented levels of angst” to pick cool enough names for their kids, with some even hiring consultants, according to a June Wall Street Journal report. Baby-book authors charge clients $50 for a list of ‘special’ names, and half-hour phone consultations go for $95. Another adviser charges $350 for three calls plus a comprehensive linguistic history of the selected name, and one California mother paid $475 to a numerologist to ‘test’ the name Leah Marie for ‘positive associations.’ The Journal blames the problem on too much information about names (from the Internet), as well as parents’ fear of dooming their child for life by insufficiently distinguishing their kid from others.
Cultural Diversity
Violent demonstrations in northwestern India in May left at least 18 dead, as members of the lower Gujjar caste demanded that the government put them into an even lower class, at the bottom of the social ladder (so that they would be eligible for more government benefits). The Gujjars say that being one of the government’s “Other Backwards Classes” is unsatisfactory and they deserve worse.
‘ International restrictions on tuna fishing have created a shortage in Japan’s sushi restaurants so dire that chefs are considering substitutes such as sushi prepared with raw horse or deer meat. While that would outrage many Japanese diners, some restaurateurs believe the plan feasible, according to a June New York Times dispatch from Tokyo. Said one: ‘We tasted it, and horse sushi was pretty good. It was soft, easy to bite off, had no smell.’
New Frontiers in Science
Hitachi’s ‘brain machine interface,’ which it showed an Associated Press reporter in June, might soon allow a user to don a hat and turn an appliance on or off by merely thinking about doing so. Until now, such thought-controlled instructions could only be done by people with devices implanted.
Questionable Judgment
In June, Judge Harold Kahn of San Francisco thought probation was enough for a woman who had claimed the identity of another (through stolen credit cards) and run up six months of bills and bad credit. Bonus fact: The victim had collared the perp herself, following a chance meeting, and handed her to police.
Obsessions
John Moore, 67, golfs nearly every day and has for about 20 years, according to a July St. Petersburg Times report. The golf he plays, though, consists of hitting 35 long-iron shots (five shots with each of the seven balls he owns) on a grassy median strip along Interstate 275 in downtown Tampa. “You can’t play this game one day, two days in a week,” he said. “You have to play it all the time if you want to do something with it.” What Moore wants to do with it, he told the Times, is to someday soon make his first-ever appearance on an actual golf course.
Least Competent People
In July 2007, four would-be suicide bombers were convicted in London of a botched terrorist act that came two weeks after their more successful colleagues attacked trains and a bus in that city two years earlier. The second attack failed because the leader, Muktah Said Ibrahim (who was said to have flunked math in school) miscalculated the amount of ingredients, rendering the bombs useless.
However, terror fighters make mistakes, too, as the U.S. Government Accountability Office revealed in July. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had recently granted a license for handling radioactive materials (enough for a so-called “dirty bomb”) to a fake company set up by the GAO, consisting of nothing more than a telephone and commercial mailbox in West Virginia.
Recurring Themes
Smoking Kills: David Pawlik called the fire department in Cleburne, Texas, in July to ask if the “blue flames” he and his wife were seeing every time she lit a cigarette were dangerous, and an inspector said he would be right over and for Mrs. Pawlik not to light another cigarette. However, anxious about the imminent inspection, she lit up and was killed in the subsequent explosion. The home was all-electric, but there had been a natural gas leak underneath the yard.
Cutting-Edge Research
Dr. Brady Barr, a reptile specialist with the National Geographic TV channel, needed to get close enough to Nile crocodiles in Tanzania (length: up to 20 feet) to attach data monitors to their tails and decided to dress up as a croc and crawl to them. With a crocodile suit, a prosthetic head and a metal cage (and hippopotamus dung to mask his human scent), he was able to apply tags, with video to prove it (according to a June report in London’s Daily Mail), with the scariest moment coming not from crocodiles but when a hippo wandered by, attracted by the dung scent.
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